When I got out of Stanford, I wanted some adventure. I had run across Peter Stackpole, and I wanted to be like him. A chap I had gone to school with was going to open an office for Life, the new magazine, and hired me to cover Hollywood at $30 a week. The first picture I took of any consequence was of a newcomer named Robert Taylor combing his hair. It was captioned "Beautiful Robert Taylor" in the first issue. That issue listed only four of the photographers on the masthead: Margaret Bourke-White, Peter Stackpole, Tom McAvoy and Alfred Eisenstaedt. The other four were myself, Bernard Hoffman and Bill Vandivert in Chicago, and Carl Mydans in New York. After I was in Hollywood for several months, I got summoned to New York. I took the TWA sleeper from Burbank, which was the airport for Los Angeles, and met Wilson Hicks, who had become the picture editor. He said, "You get a raise to $40 a week," so I was living pretty high. Life's offices were in the Chrysler Building, where we could keep our equipment and wait for a summons. The summons only came every so often, but we had to show up at the office every day.

My three covers were all surprises to me. Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers had been taken on a movie set where they were rehearsing. I was just snapping away and made 30 or 40 pictures. Months later the magazine came out with one of the photographs on the cover. I took Harpo Marx at a weekend party in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He didn't have his wig and was sensitive about his baldness, so he made a little crown of leaves and put it on. I snapped his picture, and again to my surprise, there was Marx posing like a Roman emperor on Life's cover. The third was just as coincidental. Some editor suggested I go see Lucius Beebe, who was a well-known bon vivant at the time. We hit it off, and he put on a fancy vest and a top hat and wore a hearty watch chain across the vest. I thought that was a very good picture. Most of the time, I used a Leica, but here I used a 4x5 inch camera on a tripod. The photographer Otto Hagel suggested that I use flashbulbs located remotely, away from the camera. In those days, flashbulbs were the size of ordinary light bulbs, and you screwed them in and shot them off. I had bought some light fixtures, which I could carry around in a sort of suitcase. Otto was extremely good in technical matters. He had come from Germany with Hansel Mieth and photographed a lot for Fortune. He showed all of us how to arrange these lights and how to use the large cameras.

Henry Luce held court daily in a place called the Cloud Club, on the top floor of the Chrysler Building. I had the honour of having lunch with him there and looking around and seeing the likes of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, and other tycoons. Luce was aloof and fairly cool. I can't say I knew him, but I came to know his wife. They were very kind to me. They had a big estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and they used to entertain on a grand scale on Sundays. Several times I was invited to lunch there. Later on, over the years, Mrs. Luce would pass through San Francisco and occasionally give me a telephone call. I've always thought extremely highly of her for her kindness to a very young man. I was 22.

Life had a picture of a different photographer in the back of the magazine every week, and whenever they had occasion to use me, they always referred to me as "Life's youngest photographer." I wasn't much younger than anybody else, but at the time it seemed so, and I was embarrassed by this tag. Peter Stackpole was the next youngest, and he's only a couple of years older than I. Of course, Miss Bourke-White (none of us called her anything but Miss Bourke-White) was a veteran. She had an office of her own, with a secretary, and adjoining that was a larger room for the rest of us. You tiptoed around her, but she was away a good deal of the time, up in Alaska with the Eskimos or in Europe someplace. Her secretary, Margaret Smith, was very good to all of us and did quite a bit for us. On a couple of occasions, I would rent a car with Margaret and go out to Newark, which was the airport for New York in those days, and pick Miss Bourke-White up from one of her trips. She always used a large camera on a tripod and had a collection of cameras which were absolutely beautiful, made of rosewood, with red leather bellows. She carried big suitcases around and had people following her, carrying_well, she was so imperious that she could get a bank president to carry her lights for her, that sort of a thing. She wasn't like the rest of us at all.

And we didn't see much of Eisenstaedt. He used to come to the office occasionally, but in the office were mostly Mydans and Stackpole and myself. Mydans and I had an apartment in New York together. At one point, I had run into a girl I had known at Stanford who was then a researcher at Life, and I introduced her to Carl. At the end of 1937 I was sent back to the Coast to do another Hollywood stint, and Carl wrote me to say I might be surprised to know that he was marrying my friend Shelley Smith.

Carl was very nice to me. He was a little bit older than we were. He was helpful and cooperative, but Carl was primarily a journalist from the very beginning. The pictures he took were coincidental with him. Some of the photographers were more concerned with the artistic end of things. I was neither artistic nor journalistically inclined, really. I was inclined toward adventure and experience. I was doing what Mr. Hicks told me to do. I was sort of typed to be the "Life Goes to a Party" man, which I didn't much care about, but I did do a story on Haiti with a man named Alexander King, who was one of Mrs. Luce's friends.

King was mostly involved with theatrical people, and he became a Life editor, with a sort of roving commission. He wasn't a magazine type. He was a very eccentric but a very likeable man -- a wild-haired fellow and a Hungarian. For some reason he got very interested in Haiti, which was having a war with its neighbour on the same island, Santo Domingo. He asked for me to come with him, and we sailed to Haiti on a ship, which was really the only way to get there at that time, although Pan American had a weekly flight.

We stayed in Haiti several weeks, taking various pictures around the place. We took some pictures of the President's inauguration. But what we really wanted to see was this war with the neighbouring country, so we hired a car and driver and drove up into the mountains on a bad road, and took two or three pictures on the border and so on. Then we came back, and through some anthropologist King knew, we got involved in this voodoo thing. It took up several pages in Life, and I was very disappointed. It was simply a ceremony in the jungle. They massacred a chicken, did a lot of dancing around and beating of the drums, and I set off a zillion flashbulbs (which I threw in the jungle), but I didn't think the pictures showed very much. There's a double-page spread, as I recall it now, of various aspects of the chicken massacre, that sort of thing. Although it didn't seem to me that we accomplished a great deal, there were two or three dramatic pictures that came from it. We did go up to King Christophe's citadel, a really extraordinary place up in the mountains, but I didn't do much with the people themselves. If I had been older and wiser, I think I could have done more about photographing the essential Haiti. The squalor. I'd try to get at the heart of that very strange place.

The notion that the "free world" has its own not so free mechanisms of mind control and propaganda is not new. But the "nuts and bolts" of the process are always fascinating and Ms. Saunders has worked very hard to provide information well beyond what was previously available in the public domain. In "Who paid the piper" she sets out to investigate the role of the CIA in funding and managing the cultural cold war. Many of the details of this effort are still hidden in secret CIA files, but now that the cold war is over, many erstwhile cold warriors are more than willing to tell war stories and settle old personal scores. This (understandable) vanity and Ms. Saunders wide-ranging efforts have uncovered a fascinating story.

She begins (like the cold war itself) in post war Europe. Amidst the apocalyptic devastation, the Americans were able to provide luxury and free whisky; and young adventurers eager to join the struggle against the new enemy, the Soviet Union. Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the twentieth century will be hooked from the first chapter as everyone who was anyone makes an appearance: AJ Ayer (intelligence), WH Auden and JK Galbraith (Morale division of the strategic bombing survey!), Nicolas Nabokov (ditto), Herbert von Karajan (de-nazified composer), Sartre (massively hung over on American whisky), André Malraux (ditto) and so on. The American military govt. sponsored 18 symphony orchestras, launched a theatre program with themes like "power of faith" and "equality of man"…and blacklisted "Julius Caesar" (because of its "glorification of dictatorship") and "all the Greek classics" (because they accept the blind mastery of faith!). Such details are endlessly entertaining and instructive and this is just the beginning. Soon we are introduced to the big guns of the anti-Communist intelligentsia ( the rapist Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol etc) and all the CIA operatives who managed them and paid for their lifestyle. It’s a great story and Ms Saunders manages to hold it together all the way to the late sixties when the cold war consensus finally cracked under the strain of Vietnam and the accumulated sins of the American empire.

Here is the story of the "Congress for cultural freedom", the magazine "Encounter", the free copies of "The God that failed", the festivals of the arts, the patronage of abstract expressionism, the role of the Museum of Modern Art, and finally, the dizzying array of fronts and foundations that paid for the whole enterprise. Everyone from Nelson Rockefeller (formerly of the OSS) and the Ford foundation, to John Wayne and Cecil B. Demille make an appearance and do their bit for the triumph of the free world. One can quibble that the third world end of this operation gets little mention. Maybe Ms. Saunders will write another one someday about the activities of the CIA in the third world. Meanwhile the detail uncovered here is enough to justify the book.

While the anti-Communist crusade produced the McCarthy era (when works removed from USIA libraries included Thomas Mann’s "The magic mountain", Tom Paine’s "selected works", Albert Einstein’s "theory of relativity" and the works of Sigmund Freud), this unsophisticated hooliganism was not the work of the CIA. The people who ran the CIA’s defence of the "free world" believed little in freedom and even less in democracy, but they were East coast patricians who thought of themselves as the heirs and defenders of the great (aristocratic) western tradition. The links between the CIA and the art world alone are enough to make your head spin. While McCarthy and his fellow know-nothings were busy banning books and hunting communists under every bed, the CIA paid for and encouraged the kind of art that still makes rednecks see red. All these subtle nuances and ironies are there in Ms. Saunders book and she bends over backwards to be fair and even handed. Still, she isn’t shy of pointing out in the end that:

"Behind the unexamined nostalgia for the "golden days" of American intelligence lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, plotted assassinations, supported dictatorships, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. "In the name of what?" Asked one critic. "Not civic virtue, but empire."

Readers can make their own judgments about the lessons we learn from this history. Meanwhile we should thank her for providing us with such a well-written and richly detailed portrait of the "cultural cold war". It may be necessary to go back to the work of Noam Chomsky and his friends to gain the correct perspective in which to view these facts. But no matter what your ideology, the vast array of facts assembled in this book is a treasure. A worthy contribution to history, "it is about redeeming truth for truth’s sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present." To quote Allen Ginsberg:

"(this conspiracy) was of some importance, since it secretly nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals, provided sustenance to thinkers in the Academy who influenced the intellectual tone of the west…after all, intellectual tone should be revolutionary, or at least Radical, seeking roots of disease and mechanisation and dominance by unnatural monopoly.. And the government through foundations was supporting the whole field of "Scholars of war"…the subsidisation of magazines like "Encounter" which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence.. failed to create an alternative, free, vital decentralised individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism."

But of course Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Beatles, the new left, the hippies and most of all, the one million Vietnamese who died under American bombs, did manage to "punch a hole in the Big Lie"….the "cold war consensus" finally collapsed in the late sixties and while humpty dumpty is still on top of the world, he sure isn’t in one piece anymore. Who keeps him on top, and how, should be material for some future book.